FECFA Website

Giving a new impetus to the teaching of Arabic.

A few details

Project Description

The Fondation pour l’Education et la Culture Franco-Arabe supports cultural exchanges between France and Arab countries and promotes bilingual and trilingual education. Arab dialects are widely spoken in France, either by French citizens from Arab origin or by Arab expatriates who live in the country.

What FECFA does

Approach

FECFA seeks to give a new impetus to the teaching of Arabic to a broad audience and to further mutual understanding between French and Arabic speaking citizens. FECFA is particularly active by promoting bilingual education for young people.

Planning

Fecfa uses Arabic typography to tell a story with great values. The result was pretty satisfying on all sections of the site. It took some work to set up the styles but when we were done the site looked the way Fecfa wanted the website to be.

SEO

There are many aspects to SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web. Sometimes SEO is simply a matter of making sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand.

Research

The state of web support for Arabic and other right-to-left language speakers has historically been so poor, that making efforts to properly display their language can create an exceptionally delightful experience for the users.

Loving it

95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.

A platform such as WordPress supports internationalization and localization out of the box and contains ready-made translation files (called .po files) for most standard strings. WordPress also contains a mechanism to easily switch the layout of any site from left-to-right (LTR) to right-to-left (RTL) while preserving shared content.

We didn’t use the same images that we would have used for an English website, We needed to individually select appropriate images for Arabic viewers of the site. The first major deliverable is a clickable HTML prototype.

Our research shows that 30-40 percent of Internet users in the Middle East regularly use smartphones and tablets, and such devices are particularly popular with the growing young population. So, for FECFA, we’ve designed the website to be more like an intuitive app, as it is usually the most common way for them to get information.

Related

*We Make Digital Simple

"Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there you can move mountains." - Steve Jobs